Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld: Vertigo of Archive: Fragments for a Video Installation

For the occasion of the centennial marking Denmark’s sale of its former colony the US Virgin Islands to the United States, Danish National Archives are undertaking a mass digitisation of their archival records from St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John. In this presentation I trace my own personal encounters with the colonial archival records and the digital interfaces that frame them in an attempt to explore how the digitization participates in the distribution of the past’s racial hierarchies today. What are the new sites of forgetfulness and unspeakability created by the desire for data visualization and mass digitization? How to account for the viscerality inherent in the archival records? How do historical cartographies mix with personal cartographies building a multidimensional space, creating “stereograms” of deferred perception and memories? How do I position myself in relation to the archive? Or rather how does the archive orient and position me?

The digitisation of the archives was originally presented as a gift, even though Denmark stole 250 years of memory after selling off its colony to another colonial power. It was presented as a gift to avoid reparation. To gain access to the material I draw on the figure of the Data Thief, which I have appropriated from the Black Audio Film Collective’s seminal work The Last Angel of History from 1996. I find in the figure of the Data Thief, which was made at the advent of the Internet – but which somehow excels the vulnerabilities and ethical dilemmas of today’s data desire – a sensibility that attunes us to the sonorous and affective reverberations of the archive. A sensibility in which time keeps enfolding on itself in the present. A sensibility that is suitable to advance an ethico-aesthetic practice, one which we might situate with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a “reparative critical practice” that forces us to stay in the cybernetic fold of radical, creative, decolonial & technological reimagination.

Biography

Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld is a visual artist and postdoctoral researcher at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She is affiliated with the Uncertain Archives Research Group as a resident artist. She has directed the video installations Djisr (The Bridge) 2008, TIME: AALBORG | SPACE: 2033 (2010), movement (2012), Leap into Colour (2012-2015), Schizo Archive (2016). She is currently developing the video installation Vertigo of Archive/ The Christmas Report as part of the Uncertain Archives Research project. Her current research explores notions of affect, time and materiality in relation to different archival contexts.